Startup Builds Power-Efficient Servers With Netbook Chips

Atom chips are the underpowered CPUs inside most netbooks. But one company has found a way to stitch 512 of them together to create a single powerful server.

SeaMicro has used 1.6-GHz Intel Atom processors to create a system that consumes just a fourth of the power and space as a traditional server, while aiming to deliver comparable computing performance.

The concept eschews the use of specialized, high-performance server chips in favor of the Atom processor, which was been designed for netbooks and other mobile devices. Atom is a low-power chip that is designed for tasks such as surfing webpages and checking e-mail among other things.

“We are trying to to build a single big server out of a lot of little chips,” says Andrew Feldman, CEO of SeaMicro. “”We can have 2,048 Atom-based processors on a rack delivering the highest density of CPUs in the market.” SeaMicro’s Atom-based server will be available starting July.

Traditionally most servers use Intel’s Xeon or Itanium processors, or AMD’s Opteron chips. These processors deliver high computing strength but also suck power, making utility bills one of the most expensive costs for a data center. Based on its measurements, an Atom chip can deliver half the performance of a Xeon processor for a sixth of the power, says SeaMicro.

“For a server of this nature, this is the first time we have seen Atom chips used,” says Cal Braunstein, chief research officer for research firm Robert Frances Group.

SeaMicro’s server module uses just three components: Intel’s Atom chip, memory and an ASIC designed by the company.

The Atom-based servers target a few specific tasks performed by data centers. In the past, servers were largely used to solve a small number of complex data-based problems, says Feldman. But the internet changed this. In the internet-focused data center, the challenge is to handle millions of small tasks such as searching, mapping and viewing pages quickly, and to do this in a way that can handle unpredictable bursts of traffic.

SeaMicro is going after this market, says Braunstein.

“They are going after boxes in the data center that are really not doing a lot of high-performance computing or database computing,” he says. “By addressing that niche and tightly packaging everything, they can offer a low power processor for a very specific use.”

SeaMicro says it has shrunk the server unit — which it defines as a processor plus memory unit — to the size of a credit card and removed 90 percent of the components that lie on a traditional server. Eight of these credit card-sized servers rest on a 5 inch by 11 inch board. Sixty four of these boards go into a SeaMicro system that’s about 17.5 inches tall and 30 inches deep — approximately 10 rack units in a data center.

Just changing the CPU to a low-power chip, though, isn’t enough says SeaMicro. The trick lies in creating a new architecture that can pull all the chips together and manage their power requirements.

“If you just replace the chips in a traditional server with Atom processors, the power consumption actually goes up,” says Feldman.

Integrating features such as storage, networking and server management into a single ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) helps manage power better, says the company. It has also virtualized the CPU input-output so those modules that would have otherwise occupied space on a board and consumed power don’t anymore.

Though SeaMicro has used Atom processors for its chipset, the company says it has designed its architecture to be flexible and support any CPU. So any low-power chip included that from ARM, which runs on most smartphones today, can become a part of SeaMicro’s system.

But Atom remains the best choice for now, says Feldman. ARM processors used in cellphones consume much lower power than an Atom chip but they also cannot deliver the same kind of computing performance, he claims.

SeaMicro’s Atom servers, though, are not for everyone. They are geared for a very specific kind of server operation — one that involves throwing out a lot of web content, says Braunstein.

That should be good enough for internet giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo to replace some of their servers in their gigantic data center, hopes SeaMicro.